5 years

I’ve joined Pythian exactly 5 years ago. Back then I was a performance guy, with no real DBA and operational support experience. I knew enough about technologies though. Still getting up to speed with common admin tasks took me almost a year. At some point later it became a bit boring: dealing with out of space issues and other noise during on-call can’t be appealing for long. After ~2 years I had an opportunity to join a big project which required experience in things I was familiar with. It lasted for almost a year, and it was a useful experience.

Then I got back to normal DBA work for a short period of time, after which I’ve joined another big project. This one was tricky at the beginning, and continues to be one of a kind for almost 2 years. Initially I was tasked to help with performance issues in an application I’ve never seen before, running on top of application server I’ve never touched. It took me few weeks to figure out unknown bits and pieces, and a few months to get stuff fixed (as it usually happens, negotiations how to make necessary changes take time).

After the app was fixed, I joined another part of a big project which is dealing with Oracle eBS. The work I did there was mostly operational support, helping with whatever things I can handle: almost anything but installation/patching/cloning which are things that seems to be high priority in eBS world. I did performance troubleshooting tasks as well, and it happened so that now I do performance work mostly for more than half a year. I really like it: I use my top skills to get to the bottom of issues, then fix it, get feedback pretty quick, and learn something along the way sometimes.

Such a long time on a dedicated project led me to a move to eBS team within Pythian.
Again, I need to catch up on stuff I know partially … same as 5 years ago